NON-BALINESE INDONESIAN PAINTERS AND THE PROBLEMATIC OF IDENTITY IN BALI

This article is an attempt, in an Indonesian context, to understand how the “center” of a states, through the voice –here the brush- of its representative, “imagine” its periphery – areas that are historically and culturally different, and how this periphery reacts. Focusing on the case of Bali, it will show how the painting discourse of the non-Balinese painters is closely related to sociopoloitical environment. The artists of the post-independence period, bathing in a mood of nationalist enthusiasm, tended in their representation of Bali to de-emphasize the exotic signs and on the contrary underline the common Indonesian features. After mass tourism took the island by strom in the 1970s, non-Indonesian painters became in their majority the ideological mouthpiece of tourism, providing the images exotic paradise that justified and encouraged the take-over of the island by outside capital. To this alienating discourse the modern Balinese artists reacted not in a political way, which was then impossible, but by producing work that discarded the outward exotic signs of Bali in their representation (offering, women etc) to focus on the Hindu symbolic core. Their works were therefore an assertion of identity and therefore of “difference” toward the Indonesian states. However, a new wave if modern artists, Balinese and non-Balinese, is now exposing the deceit of exoticization and by doing so, finding a new ground of exchange and communication beyond ethnic differences. Painting is thus one of the fields where the Tunggal (One) and the Bhinna (Different) of the Indonesian national motto (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika) are dialectically locked into one another

Spontaneous parametric down-conversion

Spontaneous Parametric Down-Conversion (SPDC), also known as parametric fluorescence, parametric noise, parametric scattering and all various combinations of the abbreviation SPDC, is a non-linear optical process where a photon spontaneously splits into two other photons of lower energies. One would think that this article is about particle physics and yet it is not, as this process can occur fairly easily on a day to day basis in an optics laboratory. Nowadays, SPDC is at the heart of many quantum optics experiments for applications in quantum cryptography, quantum simulation, quantum metrology but also for testing fundamentals laws of physics in quantum mechanics. In this article, we will focus on the physics of this process and highlight few important properties of SPDC. There will be two parts: a first theoretical one showing the particular quantum nature of SPDC and the second part, more experimental and in particular focusing on applications of parametric down-conversion. This is clearly a non-exhaustive article about parametric down-conversion as there is a tremendous literature on the subject, but it gives the necessary first elements needed for a novice student or researcher to work on SPDC sources of light.Comment: Comments & questions are welcom

AFFANDI VERSUS ORIENTALISM IN BALI

When thinking about the role played by visitor-artist in the cultural history of Bali, the names that usually come to the mind are those of westerners, be it those who taught techniques to local artist, like Walter spies and Rudolf Bonnet, or those who, just like the aforementioned Spies and Bonnet, created for an expectant foreign public the image of Bali as earthly paradise, like Le Mayeur, Theo Meier, Hofker. Yet , Bali did not remain the preserve of westerners for long. As early as 1939, before World War Two, the painter Affandi, who was to become Indonesian painting’s international star, made a long sojourn in Bali, from 1939 up to the time of the Japanese attack in 1942. Later, between 1957 and his death in 1990, he was to make regular visits to the island, which become his main source of inspiration. Affandi, and he score of Indonesian artists who worked or settled in the island in his wake, were to have a defining influence on Indonesian painting, in particular in the way Indonesian artists constructed, in Bali and through Bali, an image of their national identit

An atomic test of higher-order interference

Canonical quantum formalism predicts that the interference pattern registered in multi-slit experiments should be a simple combination of patterns observed in two-slit experiments. This has been linked to the validity of Born's rule and verified in precise experiments with photons as well as molecules via nuclear magnetic resonance. Due to the expected universal validity of Born rule, it is instructive to conduct similar tests with yet other physical systems. Here we discuss analogs of triple-slit experiment using atoms allowing tripod energy level configuration, as realisable e.g. with alkaline-earth-like atoms. We cover all the stages of the setup including various ways of implementing analogs of slit blockers. The precision of the final setup is estimated and offers improvement over the previous experiments.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Multiple Quantum Well AlGaAs Nanowires

This letter reports on the growth, structure and luminescent properties of individual multiple quantum well (MQW) AlGaAs nanowires (NWs). The composition modulations (MQWs) are obtained by alternating the elemental flux of Al and Ga during the molecular beam epitaxy growth of the AlGaAs wire on GaAs (111)B substrates. Transmission electron microscopy and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy performed on individual NWs are consistent with a configuration composed of conical segments stacked along the NW axis. Micro-photoluminescence measurements and confocal microscopy showed enhanced light emission from the MQW NWs as compared to non-segmented NWs due to carrier confinement and sidewall passivation